I take issue with your use of the word "manipulation". It has deliberate misleading connotations as if Google and its partners are scamming their customers. If a person is more susceptible to influence from the media, then they should limit their exposure or take precautions to avoid undue influence. I am sure there are companies and individuals who will leverage the personal information about a specific target demographic to apply as much influence as possible to promote whatever agenda they may have, whether it is to sell a product, sway an opinion or evoke an emotion. It's not any different from hucksters and snake oil salesman. P.T. Barnum was right, BTW.
The information Google provides is generally in accordance with the local laws, in as far as it's possible to comply with every statute and addendum on every bill passed globally. If they've got personal information about you, it is either anonymous statistics or you have (either knowingly or inadvertently) given them permission to have it. If it comes back to bite you, most likely it is in the category of "people are idiots who want a nanny state to protect them from the big bullies," or "I want to do whatever I want with no consequences."
If you apply for a loan, the lender is going to check your credit. If you get stopped for a traffic citation, the local authorities will check if you have a criminal record. If you make a phone call the utility will log the source, destination, route and duration of the connection. And all this data collection happens without Google. Are we worried about these entities surveilling us too?
With your insurance example, it's not likely that the insurance company could identify an individual and link the information to the person. Nor would it be legal to base an approval, denial or premium rate on such information. What they do is establish criteria basted on the actuarial tables and demographics and apply them to you as you fit into a certain group. To use your example, they would analyze the data and if there was a correlation between car racing and alcohol use, they would see if there were any other commonalities with those two activities and if they found that a certain percentage of people who participated in them also showed interest in sm-sex, then they could examine their income to liability ratio and adjust the premiums accordingly based on how well you fit the profile. Over a small sampling of people, it would prove to be a fruitless exercise, but when applied to a large model, they could accurately anticipate their P/L and move the business in the direction needed to remain profitable. They wouldn't single you out, personally.
I understand protecting personal information to keep a company from leveraging its position against you, but are you saying that it is equally reasonable to be able to misrepresent yourself indiscriminately because they don't have that data? Really, other than knowing you represent a specific liability (which you do, if their information is correct) what would be the benefit to you of them NOT having the data?
and incidents like "'accidently' collecting wifi data while taking street view
pictures" made me suspicious about google and it's "don't be evil"...
You do understand exactly what happened, right? The people collecting the street view information were simultaneous logging the images with gps coordinates and public WiFi locations to provide the most accurate way of delivering location information to the consumer. When their radios encountered a private, unsecured network that was broadcasting a ssid, it attempted to connect, as the technology is designed to do, and logged the information including any discoverable devices on that network. They even maintained to retain data packets from these private networks, because that's all part of the handshake/discovery process. When they dumped the data back to the servers for analysis they shoveled the extraneous data to a backup and removed it from the public database (because, as any database administrator learns ... sometimes catastrophically ... you never delete anything without a backup). They took the mea culpa on that one but not because they were sneaking about peering in people's networks, but because they were careless enough to not have protocols in place to keep people from being careless with their personal data.
Let's say I am collecting trash in your neighborhood ... the old bag over-the-shoulder and a nail on a stick. And, you have discarded sensitive bank records in your trash, expecting them never to be seen my anyone before they are destroyed in the landfill. The wind blows your trash can over and while I am walking around I pick up all the paper on the block. When I get back to the truck and begin separating the recyclables, i notice the bank slips and see there is legible information on them. I throw them in to the "trash" bin instead of the recycling bin.
Now, I have your data without your permission from the moment I picked it up. Should I be held liable for having it, even though i didn't know what it was? And after I knew what it was, am i responsible to destroy it so that it is secure for you? Or, am i supposed to carry around a paper shredder in my sack, just on the off chance that someone's sensitive personal information is laying about on the street?
We live in the information age. To some degree, all information collected about you will be used to your benefit or detriment, whether it is Google, Microsoft, Apple, the IRS, Facebook or your Aunt Martha collecting it.
